Small wonders Art*o*mat is a delightful machine BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Go ahead, slap your forehead. You’re not the first person to wish they’d thought of it first.

The Art*o*mat is more useful (not to mention esthetically enlightening) than sliced bread. First off, it converts to benign use those cigarette machines that have been around ever since the 1920s, when inventor William Rowe came up with an easy way for people to purchase poison.

It’s come to Rhode Island, dispensing art — five bucks, cheap! — around Newport. And it’s on its way to Providence.

Cheap and varied, as oohing and ahhing passersby were finding out in mid-August at the Newport Folk Festival, where the so-far lone machine in the state was attracting attention. You got your mini-collages and teeny-weeny paintings and drawings — individually made, not mere reproductions. There is Styrogami, which is just what it sounds like. And one artist offers a miniscule variation in his talking board series, in this case a ouija board and tiny CD that plays spooky music.

"So far it’s been wildly successful," says Molly Sexton, the development coordinator for Newport’s Project One, a non-profit established in 1997 to bring art to public spaces."It won’t always be that gangbusters. Right now we’ve got a lot of juice and mojo going on."

Text-based and conceptual artists are doing very well on the Newport Art*o*mat. By the end of the first month, almost 200 packages had been sold.

"It should provide a steady, dependable revenue stream for Project One," Sexton says. "And will be the first dependable revenue stream that the organization has ever had." As well as being profitable for her organization — she’s hoping for as much as $5000 a year — the Art*o*mat also hits the mission bull’s-eye.

"It’s a perfect fit. Project One is about putting art in places where people don’t expect to find it," Sexton says. "We’re a public art organization but with a real goal toward taking art out of museums and galleries, places where people seek it out, and bring it instead into places where people trip over it."

Project One received a $3500 mini-grant from Rhode Island Foundation to get the project off the ground. Her organization has a one-year contract for a nomadic Art-o-mat in Rhode Island. The Newport vending machine was slated for two-week visits to a cocktail lounge, a coffee bar, and a shoe store, as well as the Island Arts Center on Broadway. Newport This Week has been running a free Art*o*mat ad, showing the current location. Since that means publicity for the store, that also means a contribution to the arts organization from those businesses.

The Project One Art*o*mat is restless, but other places in Rhode Island could arrange with the project’s North Carolina artist creator, Clark Whittington, for vending machines that remain in place. Sexton mentions that Providence Convergence director Bob Rizzo would like to put one in City Hall.

"I want to move it around Newport for a few months to see how that works, and get bugs out of the system," Sexton says. "Then I would like to bring it to events in Providence and see how it’s received there. If the program works really well, then we could commission a second machine that we would rotate around Providence. So Project One would have an Art*o*mat fleet."

Of each $5 that art-lovers fork over — the Newport machine is the first one in the country that takes bills — the artist gets $2.50, Art*o*mat gets $1, and the sponsoring organization gets $1.50. Commercial hosts are encouraged to donate their cut to a local arts-related nonprofit.

Promotion more than profit is the motivation for most of the 22 artists represented in the Newport machine. So far, Ilse Buchert Nesbitt, who runs Third & Elm Press in Newport, is the only local artist dispensing her work — woodblocks and accompanying block prints.

"I think it’s kind of an amusing idea," she says, and laughs lightly. "I’m doing it for the fun of it. Being a part of it, seeing what art can do."

The first used cigarette machine was reconditioned into an Art*o*mat in 1997, and by the end of this year about 60 should be distributed around the country, containing work of nearly 400 artists from 10 countries.

"As soon as I started doing the project, artists started to step up," says Art*o*mat creator Whittington, speaking by phone from his home in Winston-Salem. "They were interested in doing work. That’s been the case from day one."

Locations include the Whitney Museum in New York, an art supply store in South Carolina, and funky cafés galore.

"Some art centers pull a snob approach," Whittington says. "They think less of us because we have machines in coffee shops and hospitals and we aren’t just playing the art center game. But that’s not what we are about. I’m looking for energy and where people will see the art. That’s why Project One appealed to me, because they’re going to run it well. I’m real excited about that — they’re going to take it to all these places."

Today Newport, tomorrow every Rhode Island truck stop (next to the condom dispenser).

Well, an Art*o*mat is banging on the door at Oop!, at least. The art/artisan gift store will have one at its Thayer Street location come November 8.

"I can’t even tell you how much I love it," said proprietor David Reardon, who discovered the device on a trip down South. "When my wife and I first saw it, we were giddy with delight." Oop! is also hoping to sponsor another machine at its Providence Place Mall store in January.